Chicago youth venturing into the wilderness of young adulthood soon will have a new tool to connect them to jobs and training opportunities.
Yolobe, which aspires to be a LinkedIn for Chicago high school students, aims to tackle the city’s alarming youth jobless rate with a social media app that connects students and recent graduates with relevant opportunities they might miss on crowded job boards or at time-consuming career fairs.
Yolobe is short for Your Life Only Better.
Co-founder and CEO David Douglas believes it’s a connection shortage, not a job shortage, that keeps many young people out of the workforce.
“There are actually plentiful opportunities, but youth don’t know about them,” said Douglas, who worked as a consultant before forming the startup four years ago.
Yolobe, which operates out of tech incubator 1871, is preparing to launch a pilot program at Carl Schurz High School in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on March 9, and to roll out across the Chicago Public Schools system in late March or early April so graduating seniors can use the tool as they make post-high school plans.
Only about 40 percent of CPS graduates go to a four-year college — and just less than half of those in college graduate within six years — so many seek employment or other training.
But employment prospects for Chicago youth have been bleak. Among CPS graduates with the lowest qualifications, 37 percent were neither working nor in college in the fall after high school graduation, according to a 2013 report from the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research.
Unemployment is particularly stubborn among black youth living in highly segregated communities on the South and West sides that also have been the scene of much of Chicago’s violence.
Among black youth, 13 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds and 39 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds were not working and not going to school in 2015; that compared with 9 percent of teens and 22 percent of early 20-somethings in the city overall, according to a report released last month by the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“To me, this population of young people is the one that’s problematic in our society today,” said Jakki Dace, senior partnership development liaison for the CPS Careers and Technical Education program.
Dace sees promise in Yolobe as a way to reconnect the city’s “disconnected” youth and help employers eager to recruit recent high school graduates.
Employers such as ComEd, People’s Gas and Sodexo, plus numerous workforce training providers and unions with apprenticeship programs, come to Dace with varied entry-level opportunities, but disseminating the information to youth is time-consuming and difficult, she said. Many students don’t read their email, and the school district often loses contact with them once they graduate.
“Yolobe provides a place for these organizations to post easily and update easily” in a technological format young people gravitate to, Dace said. While Yolobe doesn’t have a formal relationship with CPS, Dace plans to inform guidance counselors and career coaches at all CPS schools this spring about Yolobe so they can encourage their students to use it.
Yolobe, available as a smartphone app and on the Web, currently is focused on new high school graduates but plans to serve youth aged 13 to 24, said Douglas, who co-founded the startup with Chief Technology Officer Jason Lambert. The app, a for-profit social venture, is free for users but may eventually charge for premium services.
The tool allows youth to create profiles listing their skills and interests, which Douglas said is more useful than a traditional resume for people in that age group with minimal work experience.
Employers, schools, churches, workforce development agencies and other organizations with jobs or opportunities to post also create profiles, and the individual youth users can choose to connect with those they find interesting.
Job postings and other news from those “networks” show up on the youth’s news feed, similar to Facebook. There is a verification process for the networks to ensure youth safety.
Yolobe’s initial goal is for 20 percent of the graduating population to sign up, and for 60 percent of those to still be engaged with the app a year out, Douglas said.
Tom Peters, director of workforce development at Symbol Training Institute, an Addison-based provider of advanced manufacturing training, has registered on Yolobe in hopes of reaching young people more easily.
Hosting students on field trips, or traveling to schools to present to classrooms, as he does now, takes a lot of time and doesn’t reach nearly as many students as he would like.
“The hardest thing is trying to get the message out to them,” Peters said.
And it’s hard for young people to know what they’re missing.
“Anybody who works in urban education can tell you that there’s a large number of students who lack social capital,” said TJ Pavlov, real-world learning program manager at Chicago Tech Academy, a charter high school in University Village. “They don’t have a network of professionals they know to ask for advice.”
Chicago Tech Academy used Yolobe this year to list opportunities for its internship program, now in its second year, which sent nearly all of its students on monthlong stints at employers such as advertising firm DDB and e-tailer Tie Bar.
Pavlov, who also plans to load summer job opportunities to the site, said Yolobe is useful because it is tailored to youth, who get lost on general job boards where employers aren’t necessarily looking for them.
Yolobe’s success will hinge on whether young people will use it.
Schurz High School will provide a test case when it launches the pilot next month for its Career and Technical Education students, who have been learning in class how to create profiles and use the app properly.
Kate Valente, interim principal at Schurz, said the school is targeting local businesses to post jobs in hopes of strengthening the school’s ties with the neighborhood.
“I believe that the community wants to get involved in the school but doesn’t know how,” Valente said. Yolobe, she added, “has the potential to be transformative for our students.”
Dusaan Allen, 17, a senior at Schurz, thinks so as well. He interned at Yolobe last summer and made the case for his school to partner with the startup.
“Sometimes kids be shy,” said Allen, who lives in the Washington Park neighborhood on the South Side. “So if we have an app that’s just like Facebook, Instagram, then it’s easier to use.”
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
